Description
In the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a thirty-two-year-old mathematician, Ulrich, drifts through Vienna’s intellectual and social currents, searching for a stable sense of reality and meaning. Rather than offering a conventional plot, this volume unfolds as a “story of ideas,” using Ulrich’s restless ambivalence—his shifting morals, his skepticism, and his dependence on the world around him—to probe what it means to be fully formed as a person. Musil’s sharp, modernist style turns everyday conversations, institutions, and cultural rituals into experiments in perception, belief, and self-knowledge. At its core, the novel explores identity without certainty, the limits of rational thought, and the fragile boundary between inner life and public history.
Available Editions
paperback
Vintage
Published Dec 9, 1996
752 pages
ISBN: 9780679767879
Reviews
No ratings yet. Be the first!
No written reviews yet.
Details
First Published
1930
Language
eng
Translation
From: deu
Featured in a Challenge
Content Warnings
No content warnings identified.